The Effect of Environmental Factors of Social Cognitive Theory on Hotel Employees’ Turnover Intention in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has heavily invested in high-end hotels serving guests for seasonal religious holidays and other religious tourists, international vacationers, and business conventions. For the time being this investment may have given the KSA a competitive advantage over other international high-end hotel competitors who serve some of the same groups. This investment has also been an effective economic diversification away from KSA’s over-dependency upon its petroleum- based economy that largely supports its public works infrastructure and population social services. However, this barely two-decade old business is relatively still in its infancy. Aside from the fact that the KSA has benefitted from a combination of economically beneficial natural resources, favorable political advantages of its hegemony, and financial good fortune, it also is vulnerable to potentially destabilizing forces. These hazards include unemployment, revenue volatility, and international competition for front-line expatriate labor. Although these forces are uncertain, they are potentially imminent threats. The purpose of the study was to explore the influence of environmental work-life balance, supervisory support, training and development antecedents, as they potentially could impact cognitive or personal factors such as hotel employee engagement and job satisfaction, that in turn could influence their intention to quit. Since the majority (approximately 60%) of the labor pool of front-line workers in KSA high-end hotels consists of lower paid, one-year contractors separated from their families for long periods, competitive offers from other jobs could entice them to leave. Alternatively, since the approximately 40% national KSA labor force are more formally educated, younger, more inexperienced, and higher paid, competitive offers could pursued them to leave for a variety of reasons such as employee disengagement or lack of supervisory support. Thus, both KSA high-end hotel labor populations possess potential motivations for turnover, and thus disruption could pose significant challenges in either case. The results of this study of 164 Saudi Arabian national and 101 expatriate participants - 265 full-time employees in total - employed by 10 high-end 5-star hotels in Saudi-Arabia, in a 52-question survey using seven research scales support Social Cognitive Theory (SCT). This was Bandura’s (1969; 1986) assertive framework that employee behaviors such as turnover intentions are influenced by social learning early in life. In this case, the specific results of this study suggest that factors such as work-life balance, supervisor support, and employee work engagement objectives of high-end hotel employees are significant causal factors that cognitively drive affective commitment towards turnover intentions one way or another. In this study, it was discovered that turnover intentions vary for two very different employee demographics: a) the propensity of high-end hotel 24/7/365 work employment tendency to tilt towards imbalance of work-life over home life for expatriates who are away from families for extended periods; and/or (b) the propensity of work-life imbalance, unsatisfactory supervisory support, or lack of sufficient employee engagement for KSA management employees that could lead to turnover. While these outcomes have been suggested by this study which has narrowed the labor knowledge gap about high-end hotels in the KSA that influence turnover intentions, there remain tenuous labor uncertainties that cloud the future justifying additional studies. The significance of these efforts is elevated by the high-stakes risk taken by the KSA government and citizenry, that may rest upon the will of the majority expatriate high-end front-line hotel labor force and their KSA, predominantly managerial labor force, to resist the temptation of turnover intentions.